Adobe interview: Randy Swineford, Group Product Manager, Acrobat

by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

Randy Swineford is part of the Acrobat Product Management group at Adobe Systems, with specific responsibility for features such as combining and collaboration, both which have been enhanced significantly in Acrobat 8. He talked recently with AcrobatUsers.com about his role and about some of the program’s most significant changes and additions.

Kurt Foss: Describe your key areas of responsibility for Acrobat and briefly explain how that role was carried out in the Acrobat 8 development?

Randy Swineford: "I'm a group product manager. On the product management side at Adobe, we work closely with the engineering development team. I talk to customers, define the requirements for the next release and then work with engineering to understand the feasibility of implementing the requirements—all the way through to managing bugs to the release of the product. I'm ultimately responsible—along with others—for ensuring a high-quality product that ships on time.

We get involved with every team at Adobe—marketing, sales, legal, engineering, documentation writers—and we constantly interact with customers. I never get bored with this job, mainly because I get to talk to people at companies in every industry—from power plants to defense contractors to financial services to pharmaceutical companies to government agencies—and in every job function. They always enjoy having a conversation about Acrobat and I always enjoy showing them the product."

Foss: The first thing experienced Acrobat users will notice after launching the new version is the streamlined user interface. Describe some of the key interface changes.

Swineford: "One of the things we always hear from customers—every time I do a demonstration, people who have Acrobat say 'Too bad Acrobat doesn't do this...' and I say, 'But wait, it actually does do that.'

That's why with Acrobat 8 we focused on the task-based user interface with the buttons across the top and the new Getting Started window. We spent a lot of time in this release trying to understand what parts of the product are most commonly used/needed by a "typical" knowledge worker. There are some very specific things they're looking for—such as saving a file to .doc format.

In the same vein, there's an evolution of an existing feature—combining files—something you could do in Acrobat in several ways, such as dragging and dropping page thumbnails across panes. But it took many steps and was somewhat tedious. One of the goals for combining files was to give full control to the user. We've added capabilities—you can now add an Excel spreadsheet and exclude worksheets that contain lots of data. With the current version, you'd have to delete those pages after combining. Now it’s very easy to do as part of the combining process.

Or sometimes when you put a number of files together, the resulting file size is an issue. In Acrobat 8, we've added a simple option for quickly reducing file size when combining. Also, with the addition of the PDF Package technology, we solved the problem of combining a mix of PDFs with and without digital signatures. With the current method, when you'd do that, you'd destroy the digital signatures. We wanted a way to loosely couple assorted files together, which is very common in markets such as Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC). Different people sign off on certain documents within their own area of authority and then someone else has to sign off on the whole thing. With the PDF Package concept, you can take digitally signed files and put them together with other files, and even sign the entire package of content together.

Initially that was focused on some particular workflows, such as AEC, but when we showed it to other types of people, we realized it was resonating more widely. People need a way to package together different types of documents without changing the "bits" that made up those documents. We now have a way to have a very integrated viewing, printing and searching experience.

PDF Packaging is now also the output for e-mail archiving from Outlook and Lotus notes, which is really nice—very similar to your e-mail Inbox. All of the columns are customized for e-mail and you have each message as an individual document, including the e-mail attachments. Additionally, with forms, all of the data gets aggregated back into a PDF Package.

PDF Packages is one of the things that in the future you'll see us evolve into more and different use cases and make it more customizable. People are driving us toward more of that. In the future we'll definitely invest more in the ability to customize PDF Packages for specific uses."

Foss: What was the feedback from beta testers on the interface changes?

Swineford: "As always, when you change things in the interface, for some users it's painful—especially those who have used it a long time. What we try not to do with Acrobat is make changes just for the sake of change, but rather to make changes that have a rationale and that significantly improve the product and the user experience.

When you go to the menus in Acrobat 8, they don't seem as 'heavy' as in 7. We've tried in this version to address the needs of a simple user and also high-end power users. For the vast majority, there's just one or two tools you want to always have available, and that's what we tried to optimize for.

One of the major goals this time was to streamline the interface, and to make the document more prominent. In previous versions of Acrobat, it seems like the interface is on top of the document. In Acrobat 8, we tried to make it so that the document is on top of the interface. We also added customized toolbars to allow you to really control the toolset, and rearranged a number of the menus.

It's a little like art, it's subjective. Sometimes there are differences in how people react to a different look and feel. It's hard for me now to use Acrobat 7 because there are so many new and great things we've done to change the interface in Acrobat 8.”

Foss: Since Combine and Collaboration are primary areas of responsibility for you, talk about some of the enhancements related to those features.

Swineford: "We've introduced a new type of review called Shared Review. We've had a feature in the product for some time that allowed sharing of comments—this was called online commenting or browser-based review, but some amount of work and expertise was required to make it work.

It's really valuable for everyone to see all comments during a review—as that accelerates the entire process. But the old method caused customers to call support because it was difficult to set up the Web server properly—it didn't work out of the box. You had to know what you were doing. Even with that barrier we found a lot of customers using that first generation of comment sharing. Based on that feedback, we decided to introduce a new review architecture that addresses all of these shortcomings and also provides additional value to the customer. This will replace the older technology. The old method will remain in the product for people who have built solutions around it—it'll still work in Acrobat 8 and in future releases.

In Shared Review, we changed the model. We kept hearing 'We don't want to have to always do it in a browser' or ‘It's hard to get a file up on a website.’

We've built a new model where there's a little helper application—called the Synchronizer—that runs when Acrobat isn’t running. When you go to publish your comments, they are published locally. The Synchronizer has a database underneath it that actually caches all of the comments for the file that you are reviewing. So if you are offline, Synchronizer will automatically publish your comments when you go back online. It asynchronously sends the comments to a server—not a piece of software you buy from Adobe, but something you probably already have, like a network folder on a Windows server, Sharepoint server or a WebDav folder on a website. The comments are all stored on a server as RSS feeds—an open standard—so that people could do things with comments on the back end. You can even view the comments within a RSS reader.

Our goal was to get it to work out of the box. You just point it to a network server and all of your comments are stored in that central location. When you publish and retrieve comments, it gives you notification about what's going on. When you open the document, it doesn't just show you the comments, it actually tells you 'There are two new reviewers and six new comments.' You don't have to waste time looking at documents that haven't been changed or had any new comments added.

When you start a Shared Review, the URL to the comments server is embedded in the PDF. Whoever that file gets sent to—even people the author never originally sent it to—it just goes to the server and gets the comments. So you have a very flexible workflow. You don't have to spend time asking for permission from the author to redistribute the file. Especially when you are inside a company, if the manager wasn't the right person to send it to, and it was supposed to be one of their subordinates, the manager should be able to forward it and it should continue to work. Even to the extent a person is outside the firewall and can't access the server, he can add his comments to the file, send them back to me and then it'll ask me if I want to take ownership of that person's comments. I can import them into the review as my own and say 'on behalf of consultant x' so everyone else on the inside can see those comments.

We've discovered that Shared Review also works with internet-based file sharing services, such as iDisk on .Mac.—you can use .Mac as a comment repository. It seems that a lot of these places now are starting to expose WebDav services so that we can call into them."

Foss: Any other significant Acrobat 8 features you want to highlight that best demonstrate the continued evolution and expanded usefulness of the product family?

Swineford: "One of the new tools that has really resonated in our pre-release press briefings is redaction, which we initially thought would be a very niche feature for legal and government. We've learned that the interest and application is much broader. At a pharmaceutical company, for example, they said that everything they deal with involves sensitive information of some kind—'I don't want the name of my product or my special secret sauce to go out in this document.'

The majority of the documents in a typical document management systems are PDFs, so people often don't have the original source files. The PDF files come from a lot of other sources outside the company or organization. People have asked 'How can I redact and repurpose a PDF quickly and send it out to the public, or to a manufacturer or supplier?' There's no easy way to do that today with the current Acrobat tools. In Acrobat 8, with the Redaction tool and the 'Examine document' feature, that's possible. In any document I want to send out now, I can run 'examine document' just to be sure there isn't something in the file that I don't know about.

Another big feature is the 'Start Meeting' integration with Acrobat—with the new task button. Personally, it's changed how I work. I think pulling it under the Acrobat brand was a really good strategy—it helps stretch the definition of Acrobat and gets people to think about Acrobat as a collaborative tool.

Also, Acrobat 8 Professional users can Reader-enable for commenting, form fill/save and digital signatures. The addition of fill/save and digital signatures to 8 will further promote the adoption of PDF forms."

Foss: How's it going with the integration of Adobe and Macromedia, particularly in relation to the Acrobat team and future development—beyond Acrobat 8—of the product and product family?

Swineford: "In terms of the acquisition, I think the biggest payoff is going to come in our Knowledge Worker Business Unit (KWBU). The collaboration area is a big opportunity. In the last year or so, the tide has shifted a lot in terms of moving from making marks on paper to marking up documents electronically. It's becoming much more common. We're in a good position to take advantage of that.

The integration of Acrobat and Breeze, and PDF and Flash, will create a lot of opportunities. I'm very excited about the next release of Acrobat after 8. We have a whole new team now, lots of news ideas, a lot of new technologies. We have permission now to go much further—to take Acrobat to the next level."